Archive for the ‘WordPress Tips’ Category

One of the joys of blogging upon WordPress is the fact that there are thousands of excellent plugins and themes you can utilize upon your blog, giving you the ability to easily customize your site without having to dig too deeply into the code.

Unfortunately it seems that in their excitement to configure a blog to their liking, many users forget that many of the changes they are making behind the scenes are appearing live upon the site, which can confuse many of their readers (especially if your blog breaks).

While one should always seek out for new ways to improve the appearance and functionality of your blog, users might want to consider establishing a sand box (aka beta site) where they can test out new features “live” without damaging the appearance or functionality of their site. Read More

If you blog long enough, it is bound to happen to you, even if you aren’t aware. Someone will take your content and republish it on their site, sometimes with a link, sometimes without, sometimes the full work, sometimes just a snippet. There are a million ways your content can appear on other sites, some ways legitimately and other ways less so, but they are all interesting lessons in how your readers interact with your work and, in some cases, problems you have to address.

Because, while most content reuse is fairly harmless. Some uses, especially by plagiarists and spammers, can have a negative impact on your site. This makes it important to know both how to track your content, what your rights are regarding your work, when is a good idea to step in and, most importantly, what you can do if you find that you need to.

Unfortunately, the issues are far more complex than what we can discuss in a single column, but we can definitely give a good overview of the situation and what you can expect.

Imagine sitting down to your computer one morning and opening up your blog. However, instead of finding your homepage your admin panel staring back at you, you instead see a bright red warning screen telling you that malware has been detected on the site and you are advised not to enter.

The realization quickly sinks in that, if you are seeing that error, so is everyone else trying to visit your site. You begin to hurry and try to figure out what happened but quickly realize that your site has been compromised and, if you’re even able to log in, you have a very big mess to clean up. Worst of all, when you’re done, you have to apply for reconsideration with Google and other security companies and then wait 12 hours or more for the warning to clear off.

It’s a painful process and, in the best of circumstances it can ruin an entire day and, in the worst, it can destroy an otherwise healthy site.

Still, it is an all-too-common occurrence on the Web. Bloggers learn too late that their sites are vulnerable and are left to clean up the mess an attacker leaves behind. That mess could be as simple as adding malware to the site, inserting spam links into the theme or defacing the site but in some extreme cases, it can go as far as to delete everything the blogger has done.

To help keep you, your visitors and your site safe(r) from hackers, you need to make sure your server is secure. Fortunately, it isn’t very complicated but failure to spend the time and energy today can be very costly tomorrow. Read More

If you want to grow your blog’s audience and you use WordPress.org as your blogging application, then you need to try the five WordPress plugins listed below.Â They’re easy to use, free, and can have a significant impact on the number of visitors to your blog.

The more great content people are exposed to on your blog, the higher the chances are that they’ll find something they like causing them to return to your blog again, share your content with their own online connections, and ultimately, drive additional traffic to your blog.Â YAARP is a great plugin for automatically including a list of related posts at the end of each of your blog posts.Â The Link Within widget is another alternative.

As a follow up to Jonathan Bailey’s great post yesterday, Blogging Pitfalls: Becoming a Spammer, I wanted to talk about comment spam a bit more.Â Bloggers are often inundated with comment spam, which can get so bad that they might even reconsider moderating comments.

Unfortunately, there are some forms of comment spam that have gotten out of control over the past year or so, and bloggers need to be aware of these spam tactics, try to identify them, and mark those comments as spam using their comment spam detection tool (for example, Akismet).Â Identifying comments as spam helps your spam tool better identify them in the future, so hopefully, they won’t get through to your moderation queue anymore.

But how do you know if a comment is spam if it’s not the usual link-filled or gibberish spam comment that can be identified with a cursory glance?Â That’s the problem with these newer forms of comment spam — they often look like legitimate comments, until you take a closer look at them. Read More

When you start looking for books about WordPress there a quite a few of them. Most of them however cover the subject from a fairly beginners point of view only, not Professional WordPress though. I received this book by Hal Stern, David Damstra en Brad Williams a few weeks back and have been reading it on and off… and I’m impressed.

Professional WordPress isn’tÂ particularlyÂ geared towards the general WordPress novice likeÂ butÂ more-so to the WordPress developer novice, just like Digging Into WordPress. The book is setup to describe basic operation of function and then offering guidance and example demonstrating how to take it apart and reassemble that function to fit your need.

Even though this may sound like Professional WordPress is only for developers, I do believe anyone wanting to take their WordPress installation(s) to a higher level will get a lot out of this book.

The Topics Covered

Where to begin. The Professional WordPress book offers a wide range of topics navigating you through 15 different chapters. Not all will be interesting to all, but anyone looking to broaden their WordPress knowledge will find something interesting in pretty much any chapter. Read More

Making money online is a white hot topic online nowadays and will be for a long time to come, since everybody wants to make money from their blog. Whether its a personal journal type blog or full scale rockstar blogging; a little extra bucks won’t hurt.

The process of building a blog and growing it to the point of profitability isn’t always an easy task. Attracting valuable advertisers, selling the right affiliate products aren’t always straight forward and simple and can be extremely time consuming. So here are a few plugins that will make the workload a little lighter for you so that you can focus more on building the foundation of your blog, which is, awesome content. Read More

The best (and I’d say the only) way to create a strong community of talented guest authors around your blog is to offer incentives. You want your guest bloggers to be sincere in their desire to provide quality – so you want to be sincere in your desire to pay back.

No, it is not about money. Guest blogging is about benefit exchange: the authors give your blog high-quality content (and thus traffic and leads) and you give your guests exposure.

So do you promote your guest authors enough?

Rewarding with Backlinks

You may not really like that but let’s face it: most (even awesome) guest authors contribute content for links. Being generous in linking is the sure-fire way to get plenty of active guest contributors.

Important note: your linking policies are up to you. My own take is that if the author provides awesome content, he 100% deserves at least two or three keyword-rich (or “SEOed”) links. But that’s up to you, your niche, your experience and what you belief in. I absolutely believe there is no right or wrong way to do that.Read More

In the last couple of months I see a high increased number of people starting to use Twitter as their WordPress forum. Something not restricted to the topic of WordPress I must say. More and more people seem to use the hash tag #wordpress to post their questions about WordPress, but as WordPress continues to grow – as does twitter – it’s time to revisit that hash tag.

Now I am fully aware that it’s very hard to regulate anything on Twitter unless it’s in Twitter’s API, but in my opinion the hash tag #wordpress is being used too much for just about anything related to WordPress. Varying from Theme releases, Plugin update notifications, opionions, general statements and of course the questions.. and this of course in any language spoken out there. Read More

Your blog’s loading speed affects more than just user experience but is now a factor used by google to determine an overall ranking for your site. The reasoning is clear according to google and other search engines’ goals, which is to provide the most relevant search results from sites that offer the best user experience. Site speed is definitely something we cannot not ignore and should take advantage of every opportunity to improve.

Here are 9 effective techniques and tips that can be easily implemented to make your blog lightning fast. Read More